Wrangler Dani

I felt like I should be wearing sensible, closed-toed heels, a just below-the-knee skirt and a silken kerchief knotted around my neck. It was sunny, clear, perfect: 65 degrees in February, this is the weather that has made L.A. both famous and famously overpopulated. Tall palm trees swayed in the foreground, the San Gabriel mountains rose up in the background, green from recent rain.

Around me were scraps of paper everywhere, dropped idly by old men with thick, brown hands, old ball caps or fedoras and either a pen or a cigarette clenched in their teeth. I actually picked one up and tried to hand it back to one old character, thinking he’d dropped it from his oil-stained hands by mistake, but he waved me off, “it’s no good” he laughed. Adam told me that bad bets just get discarded on the ground, but I had to walk to a forlorn trashcan anyway – like a true child of the new millenia, I couldn’t bring myself to carelessly litter.

Despite the inherent dirtiness, (we are surrounded by million-dollar livestock, after all, and there are a few obviously addicted gamblers twitching in the corners and mumbling at the TVs) there’s a pleasant air about the whole place. How could there not be? This is Santa Anita, where Charles Howard believed in his weird-looking yearling and overweight jockey and made racing history. This is the legendary track of heroes and athletes, long odds and incredible comebacks.

Horse racing, despite the money and movie magic, is a primal sport. It’s the simplest of all human competitions, a race. Kids in rural outposts across the country race their ponies from fenceline to fenceline – as adults, we simply drape the whole affair in silk, raise the stakes and go to whooping, hollering and enjoying the speed as much as we did back then.

I guess it’s appropriate to think of childhood at Santa Anita. The whole place feels like a memory, from the kindly bookies in bowties behind wooden windows, paying out the long line of scribbled bets; to the dull mint green paint on the clubhouse walls, the worn enamel stairs and the decades-old tin signs pointing visitors to “paddocks” “turf” and “winner’s circle”. It’s a hearkening back to a simple pleasure, a return to competition that is won and lost with guts, instinct and an intimate knowledge of how a horse thinks, moves, works. In many ways, it’s a way of preserving what might otherwise become a lost art. Seeing as how the clientele was overwhelmingly elderly and male, I wondered if I was alone in caring about its preservation.

But then I saw her, black ponytail bouncing as she struggled to see over the fence onto the track. “Which one is my horse, Papa?” She asked, voice tight with excitement. He was a pearl-snap and blue jeans Grandpa, and had obviously spent many a Sunday afternoon watching horse races. He picked her up with strong hands and set her on the rail, tiny pink velcro shoes dangling only a few feet from the starting line. “You have number five,” he explained. “We bet on this one because…” his voice was drowned out by the buzzer and the immediate ejecti0n of churning horses and taut jockeys, hooves pounding and dirt flying, power and beauty in motion. She clapped her hands with excitement, amazed. I couldn’t help myself – I was clapping too.

Photo by my super-talented Hubs.